Valeguard - PC Review

Valeguard is a mashup between turn-based strategy and tower defense genres and it likes to try to keep its feet on both sides of the river, but frankly, just ends up getting both feet wet.

You are introduced to your starter village in the tutorial and are taught essentially everything that you need to know. The game progresses in a day/night cycle that alternates between turn-based and real-time game modes. During the day, you choose how to allocate your workers, deciding between chopping wood, mining ore, forging weapons, building structures, or growing food. Managing these resources will be the part that makes or breaks your nighttime, so it’s important to learn what you’re doing quickly.

Then you end turn, and you get attacked (or don’t) by the undead. Your units, comprised of both regular units that you create (by giving villagers the weapons you craft) and hero units that are vastly superior to the plebeian units. Enemies approach from one or more sides (with it varying depending on which level/town you are playing) and proceed to beeline their way for your buildings unless they are attacked, at which point they will turn on their attackers in an effort to gain some company in death. Click a unit, or drag select a number of them, and then right-click to attack or move to a location, in a very Defense of the Ancients flavored control style.

And that’s about it. Sometimes a visitor comes to your village in the day, and you’re given a Choose-your-own-adventure-style choice, which will penalize or benefit you based on your selection. A beggar coming to the village can be driven off with force, ignored, or welcomed in with open arms, and he may eat some of your food, but also work as a villager for the night to give you added productivity, or if you killed him, perhaps there will be a stronger undead unit later that night that starts off right in the middle of your unprotected structures. Sometimes you’re attacked multiple nights in a row, while sometimes you get a pass, but for the most part, that’s pretty much all there is to this game.

The graphics are light and DOTA-y, the music is downright forgettable, and all in all, yeah, you’ll get $15 worth of entertainment out of it, so it is definitely worth the buy, but it’s not going to win any awards, do anything new and revolutionary, or stand out much at all.

This is a single-developer project, though, and it’s important to keep that in mind when you weigh this game against its brothers that have whole teams developing them. The entirety of this review is me picking at the limitations of the title, but it isn’t an exaggeration to say that it far outweighs a great number of single-indie-dev titles that I’ve seen, and that it is more than worth acquiring and giving a shot.